The Swan Island Connection

by Dorothy Johnston

  Chris signed it, pleased his hand was working better. He allowed himself a small, private smile.

  FORTY-SIX

  The station seemed unnaturally empty without Ferguson and his sergeants. Although there was a lot of catching up to do, Chris didn’t feel like doing any of it. He moved his things into the front office quietly and superstitiously, as though an unaccustomed noise might bring the detectives back.

  Ferguson had been following instructions and would stick to that defence. That is, if the inspector were ever required to defend himself. Chris doubted that he would be. As for failing to put a stop to a uniformed constable’s insubordination, that was a more serious and embarrassing charge, but he doubted Sergeant Shaw would suffer for it in the long run.

  Everything was relative, Chris told himself, then reddened at the cliché. He hoped Briggs would be court-marshalled. He hoped Charleston would lose his job and that Yu would be charged with importing cocaine. He doubted that this charge, if ever made, would stick. One way or another, Griffin would be persuaded to plead guilty. There would be no trial.

  Chris sat at his old desk, staring out the window at the hedge of lavender, the roses which were sprouting buds as though to make up for lost time. Though none of the men who’d occupied his office had been a smoker, he somehow couldn’t get rid of the smell of smoke. Every time he breathed in, he felt it tickling the back of his throat. He walked around behind the station, convinced that kids were smoking in the lane.

  The jug boiled in the kitchen. Anthea was making tea. Her shoulder bag was over her chair, her jacket on the peg behind the door.

  Chris stood in the kitchen doorway, noting with pleasure the two mugs side by side on the bench next to the sink. It seemed the teabags, one in each, were standing to attention.

  They took their tea out to the verandah.

  Chris thought of clean noses, smell of the salt wind with nothing rotting in it. He felt his grief for Bobby begin to soften at the edges.

  When you were young, it seemed as though you had forever. Another cliché there, Chris thought. Young skin bounced back when it was dented. Young hopes had a world in which to thrive. Minnie Lancaster’s hair curled around her collar, made a halo, though she was no longer young. Chris hoped that whoever replaced Griffin would be good to her.

  They listened to the midday news. Griffin had been refused bail and was being held at the remand centre in Melbourne. A plea of guilty was expected. There was no mention of Swan Island.

  Familiar names sounded odd spoken in the newsreader’s voice. The story would run for a few more days, then it would be dropped. Chris pictured tall men in suits congratulating the police commissioner on avoiding the worst.

  He felt no sense of achievement. The rules he’d flouted, authority he’d ignored, had nothing fundamentally to do with his sense of who he was and what policing in a small town meant to him. It had been easy for Sergeant Shaw to treat him with contempt. But this contempt, and Shaw’s opinions, felt distant, as though viewed in one dimension from a long way off.

  Chris found his feet taking him down past the Esplanade when it was time for Minnie’s break.

  ‘Well, Min,’ he said, adjusting his stride so they could walk in step.

  ‘It’ll be a relief if I don’t have to testify,’ Minnie said, making a complicated face.

  Chris thought irrelevantly that with all the mistakes his parents had made when it came to his upbringing, saddling him with an outlandish name wasn’t one of them. Fancy calling your daughter Minerva. Yet Minnie had treated it like the best joke, in the playground, all through school. She’d called herself Minerva when she’d wanted to, and laughed. The other kids had laughed with, and not at her. She’d earned her nicknames — Minnie, Min, Mousey — and worn them with a natural flair.

  Chris said, ‘Could you — would you let me take you out to dinner?’

  ‘Well now, Constable Blackie —’ Minnie smiled her golden smile — ‘that would be a pleasure. Not tonight, though. Tonight I have to work.’

  Chris smiled back. ‘Fine by me.’ That evening he had another kind of date.

  What kind of man drank his beer two-handed? The kind who understood the act of drinking as a ceremony, Chris thought. He’d seen reformed smokers lift a cigarette that way, noticed a relaxation in their cheekbones, the way the light caught softened planes.

  It was a novelty to think of Tom Maloney as a reformed anything, though now this insight had occurred to Chris, it seemed as though it always had been part of his understanding of the man. Tom might smoke himself to death, but this single beer at the Esplanade was a rare indulgence.

  Tom had bought the round. It might be years before Chris was permitted to return it, perhaps never. How hard had it been for Tom to stay away from alcohol these past weeks? What did it mean that he was indulging himself now?

  They spoke of Bobby briefly and, it seemed to Chris, without bitterness or anger. Chris’s sense of Tom as a good man returned, a good man who battled his demons with customary reserve.

  ‘All sorted then?’ Tom looked up from his glass.

  ‘As well as it can be.’

  ‘Let’s hope the bastard dies in jail.’

  ‘Would you wish that on him?’

  ‘Too right I would,’ Tom said.

  Chris walked Tom to the coastguard office and continued on to the end of Bridge Street, circling the checkpoint and coming round to the water on the other side.

  The sun was going down over Swan Bay, noticeably later now. The foreshore and low hills on the other side were bright with canola flowers. The bay looked safe and calm and lovely. The tide was going out, the seagrass meadows gold and greeny-blue.

  Swan Island shared the evening peace, the buildings low and unobtrusive; that yellow of the narrow beach on his side matching the canola flowers and flashes reflected off the seagrass. The bridge, empty of traffic, was a long, graceful curve.

  The moon appeared over the horizon; soon moonlight would shine down between the trees, a dappled light, diffused and broken up, turning branches into strange shapes that seemed to be moving of their own accord.

  Chris couldn’t believe that Minnie had said yes to having dinner with him. How different this walk in the twilight would be if Minnie were beside him. He turned his back on the island and lifted his gaze once more to the farmland on the far side of the bay, imagining, for a moment — it was a trick of the light and a trick of memory as well — that Bobby was out there paddling his kayak.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Chris said softly, reminding himself, and Bobby too, that he wouldn’t forget Sharon or her brothers.

  He realised that there really was a figure out there; and then not one figure, but two. Two small shadows separated themselves from larger ones, two paddles lifting and dipping in the luminous water, two dark, purposeful shapes, a man and a woman became recognisable as their kayaks moved closer to the shore.

  Chris took a step backwards, suddenly shy; they might think he was spying on them. He heard voices and then laughter, as Anthea, less practised than her companion, swayed from side to side, then jumped out and pulled her small buoyant craft up the slippery ramp. Chris wondered why he hadn’t noticed Olly’s car parked at the end of Bridge Street.

  Olly came up behind Anthea and put his arms around her, and they stood like that, leaning against each other for a moment, before bending and carrying the kayaks to the car. Their voices were relaxed and happy. It was nothing to them to load up in the half dark. Chris wondered where they’d got the second kayak from; had Anthea bought it? Was it a gift to her from Olly? He told himself he didn’t need to know.

  He pictured the two young people sharing an evening glass of wine on Anthea’s small balcony. He looked forward to Anthea reporting that Olly had moved on from playing scales. He flattered himself that he would be invited to join them sometimes; that he and Minnie might sometimes be invited, and might return the invitation, though to serve alcohol to guests was no recreation for Minnie.

  But h
ere he was definitely putting the cart before the horse. Minnie was not on the lookout for a man in her life. He was jumping ahead to a ridiculous extent, but told himself that he would be patient, he would see what happened.

  All those unexplored rivers: well, time would tell about them too. There remained at the back of Chris’s mind the idea that he had some unfinished business with rivers, wide-ranging rivers in countries far from the one where he’d been born. Perhaps he might even persuade Minnie to take a trip. Chris pictured again the pale wine, yellow-green, lifted in a toast. How beautiful and gentle and harmonious; how much pain there was, underneath the surface of the simplest gestures. He thought of Olly and Bobby in their kayaks, and how that image, the man and boy and their reflections on the water, would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  Read on for the first chapter of Gerard Hardy’s Misfortune, the third book in Dorothy Johnston’s sea-change mystery series.

  Sarah Kent, who had found the body, sat shaking, shoulders hunched, in the early morning shadows behind the Royal’s reception counter. This counter stood in an alcove some ten metres from the hotel’s huge front doors; the terrazzo floor that led to it would once have made the entrance grand. The counter with its phone, computer, brochures and its vase of flowers fitted the alcove snugly; the shadows were caused partly by an elaborate spiral staircase rising above it.

  As Chris Blackie stepped inside out of the pearly autumn light, he understood that Matthew, the hotel manager, had been holding Sarah in his arms and that the two had moved apart when they heard him coming.

  Chris observed as well that it would always be dim in that corner, and that whoever worked there would always need artificial light.

  Sarah’s face was red and swollen with crying, but underneath this she was a pretty young woman, her long, fair hair worn in a simple pony tail, her features clean and finely-made.

  Matthew turned to Chris and spoke gravely. ‘Here’s the key. The doors are locked, both the basement door and the one to the corridor. You’ll want to go straight down.’ The young man made a complex movement of the hand that might have included an apology. ‘You’ll see there’s renovations being done.’

  Chris had the feeling that Matthew was aware of him only as some generalised figure of a police officer. He explained that his job was to secure the area and that an inspector from Geelong CIU would be there within the hour. He said it was important that no one in the building should leave, and that no one else should be allowed to enter.

  Few of the rooms were occupied. The night before, Matthew said, there’d been only four guests — he named them quickly, the last one, Gerard Hardy, at that moment lying underneath their feet.

  Matthew’s expression indicated that he was waiting for confirmation as to the cause of death, hoping against hope that there was some other explanation for what he’d seen. But Sarah, by the look of her, had no doubts.

  Chris wondered why she’d gone down to the basement. He would have liked to stay and ask her.

  Instead, he picked up the key.

  The phone rang, and Matthew reached across to answer it. Chris was struck by how young they looked, and guilty, like two children caught trespassing perhaps.

  It was a short walk from reception to an old, heavy door, which opened onto a corridor leading to the basement stairs. Chris unlocked it, observing that the lock was new.

  He’d never liked the Royal, with its turreted tower, reputed to be haunted, and its general air of gloom. As a child, the place had given him the creeps.

  Strong overhead lights picked out the crumbling edges of the stairwell and brick walkways branching out on either side. One led to an underground bar that looked as though it had not been used in decades. Chris shuddered to think of people actually choosing to spend time drinking down there.

  Wine racks along one wall indicated that the space was being used for some practical purpose. Making his way in the opposite direction to the wine racks, Chris recalled the few facts Matthew had told him on the phone, the barely contained panic in his voice.

  ‘Something terrible has happened. There’s a — one of our guests is dead.’

  It seemed strange to Chris that, with more than half the hotel in a state of dilapidation, there were any guests at all.

  Gerard Hardy was lying on his back, at the end of the brick passage, in the area that in Queenscliff’s early days had once done duty as the morgue. He was lying on top of a sandpit, in his pyjamas and dressing-gown, with his hands in prayer position, at right-angles to his chest. Chris went close, but didn’t touch the body. Hardy’s dressing-gown cord — at least Chris assumed it was his because there was no cord attached to the gown he was wearing — was folded neatly beside him. A clear red line around his throat, lividity under the skin and bulging eyes indicated that he had been strangled.

  The dressing-gown was good quality, made of fine wool, with a tartan pattern in blue, green and dark brown. The pockets looked heavy, as though they’d been filled with sand, and sand spattered the dead man’s clothing and bare feet. It was grey and damp, not at all like the clean, yellow sand to be found on the beach. It smelt sour and mouldy, and it was this, rather than the sight of the body, that made Chris step back and catch his breath.

  It looked as though someone had been interrupted in the act of burial. Hardy’s face was clear of sand. Was it rigor mortis holding the hands upright like that? How long would they stay that way?

  Chris had a pair of plastic gloves in his jacket pocket. He longed to check the hands; but no, he must just do as he’d been told.

  After Queenscliff had grown big enough to boast a proper morgue, the area around the sandpit had been transformed into a cell, in the days when, the Royal’s basement had done duty as a mental asylum. The windows were still barred, though the door that separated this end cell from the next one had long since been removed. It was very cold, cold enough, Chris guessed, to delay the onset of rigor by an hour or more.

  Measuring with his eye, he noted that the pit was just long enough to take the body; its depth he couldn’t guess. Had Hardy known his killer? Had they descended the stairs together, or had the murderer followed his victim in silence? Would Hardy have locked the basement door behind him?

  All sounds from above were blocked off in the basement, which made any noise made down there stand out. Chris scraped his foot against the stone floor. The sound was, as he expected it to be, magnified. It was hard to imagine the killer stalking his victim without making some kind of noise.

  The light was good, if Hardy had switched on the lights. Perhaps there was a torch in one of his pockets. Did the fact that he’d apparently come down without his slippers suggest that he’d left his bedroom in a hurry? Would the search team find them there?

  Chris made a circuit of the body. On his way back to the ground floor, a new question occurred to him — what if Matthew or Sarah had arranged Hardy’s body like that, after someone else had strangled him? Thankfully, this was not a question that fell to him to answer, but he couldn’t help asking it of himself. He figured that, even if they made good time, there was still over half an hour to wait until the investigative team arrived.

  The first in Dorothy Johnston’s sea-change mystery series

  Through a Camel’s Eye

  Still he looked for hoof prints, glad there was nobody there to laugh at him for doing so. He shaded his eyes and squinted at a dark object, half covered in sand, then began to walk towards it. He should have been wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes, but he never thought of things like that. It was a woman’s coat, black, or at least it had been.

  A young camel disappears from its trainer’s paddock and the coat of a murdered woman is found abandoned in the sand dunes. These seemingly unrelated events are a far cry from the regular police duties of Constable Chris Blackie and his rookie recruit from Melbourne, Anthea Merritt, in the small seaside town of Queenscliff. Little by little and with a burgeoning sense of menace, these two unlikely detectives carefully na
vigate the eclectic, often eccentric personalities of the town, as well as the disdain of law enforcement colleagues further afield, to uncover the unsettling truth.

  Described as a ‘sea-change mystery’ Through a Camel’s Eye deftly juxtaposes the idyllic surroundings of a coastal Victorian town with the gravity of murder.

  ‘Dorothy Johnston stands with the best of Australian crime writers, her exquisite sense of people and place as evocative and compelling as the elegance of her plots.’

  Sara Dowse, author of As the Lonely Fly and West Block

  About the Author

  Dorothy Johnston was born in Geelong, Victoria, and lived in Canberra for thirty years before returning to Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula where Through A Camel’s Eye and The Swan Island Connection are set.

  She is the author of eleven mystery and literary novels, two of which have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award. Dorothy has published many short stories and essays and she reviews fiction for the Fairfax Press. For more information, please visit: www.dorothyjohnston.com.au

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